


I am tired, I am weary (I could sleep for a thousand years)

by imustgofirst



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Dreams, F/F, Filth, Sibling Incest, Spellcest, a lot of dreams, barest minimum of plot, burning in hell blah blah, pandering to religious norms, sisters literally doing it for themselves, sleeping, which is to say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 23:05:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17476667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imustgofirst/pseuds/imustgofirst
Summary: Dreams can be worse than nightmares -- especially if you're a repressed witch in love with your own sister.





	I am tired, I am weary (I could sleep for a thousand years)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UbiquitousMixie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UbiquitousMixie/gifts).



> UbiquitousMixie made me do the thing.

As familiars go, Vinegar Tom is a bit shit. Rubbish, really.

Zelda knows this. Of course she knows; how could she not? She’s Zelda Spellman, a witch of no common powers. But there’s knowing a thing, and then there’s admitting the thing, even to oneself.

If anyone asked, not that anyone, even Sabrina, would have the gall, Zelda would explain that old Tom is the ideal familiar for one such as herself — that, indeed, his stolid lumpishness is a kind of accolade, an acknowledgment of her abilities straight from the Dark Lord himself. A truly powerful witch, one of the strongest of her generation, need rely only upon herself. She isn’t like other, weaker witches and warlocks, who count on their familiars to rush to their aid in times of peril. Look, she would say to this imaginary, up-start interrogator, pointing to her younger sister’s colony of spiders as evidence. Look at these busy little creatures, constantly spinning, making work for themselves, occasionally to some purpose, but more often out of boredom and futility. How could anyone be surprised that gentle, cow-like Hilda had chosen spiders as her familiars, when they are so perfectly alike? 

Zelda would say all of this, and would most likely believe it. Truthfully, she seldom spares Vinegar Tom a thought — nor he her, she assumes. He’s simply there, as silent and uninteresting as the mortal corpses they embalm.

Later, though, she will blame him, if only indirectly. After she has thoroughly embarrassed herself, something that smarts more than hellfire licking at her flesh, in front of her entire family — after Sabrina and Ambrose and Hilda have come upon her one unusually bright December morning in the pantry, shaking a jam jar like a child investigating her gifts on the eve of solstice. Like a bloody lunatic.

“Oh!” Hilda exclaims, rushing forward, her usual timidity forgotten as she wrests the jar from her older sister’s grasp. “Satan, luv, that’s not jam!”

In retrospect, it would have behoved her to feign ignorance, would have been far less distressing in the long run, but it cuts too deeply against the grain. “You don’t say,” she retorts waspishly, snatching the jar back. She catches her nephew’s half-hidden grin from the corner of her eye. “Perhaps you’d care for some demon with your toast, Ambrose?”

He casts his eyes down, chastened, although he doesn’t know why. Zelda has that effect on people. He murmurs a “No thank you, Auntie Zee.”

Zelda settles herself in the morning room with her black coffee, half a case of cigarettes, and a Tokyo evening edition. Nothing more is said — for the moment. 

Still she doesn’t think of the spiders.

That night, a strawberry-blonde witch rambles slowly, purposelessly, through the old, creaking house-cum-mortuary, staving off sleep for as long as possible. She could whip up a tincture, of course, or cast a spell; but to use magic would feel like an acknowledgement that there is something she — not fears. Dreads, she will allow. So she hedges her bets, using weapons no stronger than the mortal stimulants of black coffee and quickly burning cigarettes. 

She is already annoyed with herself, with the childish futility of what is little more than a fear of the dark — and she from an illustrious line, the matriarch of this hodgepodge family. If anyone suggested she might be susceptible to such craven cowardice, she’d hex the fool into the next century. And yet here she is, hovering on the landing, a weak sliver of moonlight falling over her shoulder while she smokes her dozenth cigarette, when a door creaks open. Everything in this house creaks, as effective as an alarm system, at least for corporeal beings (which is to say that it isn’t very effective).

Sabrina takes two steps toward the bathroom before jerking to a stop. “Aunt Zelda?” she asks, squinting into the darkness.

And it is unfair, but also inevitable, that the older witch vents some of her inward ire on this new target. “You were expecting someone else, child?” she snaps. “You should be asleep. You have school.”

Marginally more alert now, Sabrina squints at Zelda as if her aunt has lost her senses. “I’m going to the bathroom, not sneaking out to a rave.”

“Well, be quick about it.” It’s a ridiculous thing to say. She is ridiculous. Zelda turns on her heel, pointing herself toward her own chamber, before she has to see this knowledge confirmed on the girl’s face. 

It bolsters her, somehow, to think of how foolish she has been, as she brushes her teeth, as she slips off her shoes and turns back her sheets. How unutterably silly to be affected by something as ephemeral, inconsequential, as a dream! It’s so far beneath her. She settles, closes her eyes, invokes the unholy protection of the Dark Lord. She will sleep soundly, she tells herself as sleep fuzzes the edges of her consciousness. There will be no nightmares.

She almost believes it.

—

The thing about sleep demons is that, when they are inactive — asleep, one might say, were it not too on-the-nose — they are formless, unlike, for example, a Devouring Worm. They blend with the aether, the element in which they thrive and wreak havoc, no more nor less tangible than a nightmare. A jam jar filled with sleep demon isn’t measurably different from a jam jar filled with nothing, as the Spellmans’ often are after Ambrose and Sabrina have gone to work on Hilda’s strawberry preserves. Experienced witches can detect traces of magic on such an item, but then, everything a witch touches imbibes a little magic. This is why sleep demons are so often inadvertently passed down in witching families with household items and treasured heirlooms. For Satan’s sake, the coven’s high priest kept a resting sleep demon undetected in his office for twenty-five years and remained none the wiser; so how could an ordinary witch or warlock (not that the Spellmans are ordinary, Hell forfend) know what unwanted brew inheres in Grandmother’s silver tea service, what excess baggage in Aunt Lavinia’s favorite trunk?

Zelda will not sink again to the level of shaking this particular jam jar, but she does move it from the pantry to the very back of a high, dusty shelf. It wouldn’t do at all to have the thing smashed by accident due to clumsy fingers. She notices, and doesn’t bother suppressing her eye-roll, that Hilda has labeled it in her round, schoolgirl print, just as she labels summer peaches and winter relish: Batibat, and the year.

If only Zelda could be certain.

It could, she supposes, be an entirely different sleep demon. Although Batibat confined herself to tormenting Edward in his youth, she made no secret of her desire to have revenge on the entire Spellman clan, and everyone else is looking disgustedly well-rested. From behind the cover of a left-wing Mongolian bi-weekly she scrutinizes each member of her family in turn, and concludes that everyone has slept like a baby (except the actual baby, who needed two bottles and a nappy change).

Zelda sighs, lets her relatives assume she is in despair at the state of the yak market. She doesn’t really believe she has acquired her own personal sleep demon at this stage in the game. Alas, hers are old, familiar demons, ones she thought dead and buried with no recourse to the Cain pit, back to torment her. As if everything wasn’t already going badly enough. Oh, on the surface there has been a recent uptick in the Spellmans’ prestige, what with Sabrina’s annihilation of the Thirteen, Father Blackwood’s mentoring of Ambrose, and Zelda’s enviable position as night-mother to the high priest’s son. And yet —

As if on cue, the baby lets loose with a feed-me-I’m-perishing wail, Sabrina starts, and the toaster bursts into flame. “Oh!” she exclaims, almost drowned out by the baby. “Aunties, I — I —“

Zelda flips a page, knocks ash from her smoldering cigarette into her empty espresso cup. “An untrained, newly baptized witch can be dangerously volatile. Until you’ve mastered your powers, you must suppress them.”

“But Auntie Zee —“

She lowers the paper enough to meet Sabrina’s wide eyes. “Suppress them,” she repeats. “It’s only a matter of willpower, and I’m told even some mortals have that.”

Zelda knows whereof she speaks. Her will isn’t iron, but it is steel, tempered in hellfire. She has some experience with suppression too, which she draws upon now to suppress the snide internal voice that says she’s doing a marvelous job willing away her dreams.

—

On a Wednesday Hilda, home on time for once in recent memory, considers her sister as they sit across the table from one another at dinner. It is just the two of them and Leticia tonight. “You look tired.” The skin around her vivid blue eyes is tight with concern, and Zelda has killed her for less, not once but half a dozen times.

However, the older witch only focuses on relaxing the pronounced line that furrows her brow and says, “I’ve had a long day, sister, with the baby, and two bodies in the embalming room.”

Hilda takes it as a reproach, droops a bit over the cottage pie. “It is a lot, with Ambrose spending so much time at the Academy. Have I taken too many shifts at the store, do you think? I could cut back.”

Zelda meets her hesitant self-doubt with frigidity. “How could I possibly know what you’re capable of handling, when we’re so different? Certainly I’m getting along fine without you here.” Hilda droops more, the long, loose sleeves of her lime green cardigan nearly swallowing her. This is their dance: Zelda admonishes her sister for her increasing absences, and then, while Hilda stews in her guilt, the older witch scoffs at her hubris, ensures that Hilda knows the idea of Zelda needing her, of even noticing whether or not she is present, is absurd.

“You’ve undercooked it again,” Zelda adds, giving the mush on her plate a last vicious poke before letting the fork fall with a clatter. “It’s as Mother always said: if you’re going to do something in a slapdash way, it’s better not to do it at all.”

They both know Zelda is not offering to assume meal preparation duties. She’s behaving badly, not bothering to rein herself in since their niece and nephew are absent, and she hates Hilda a little right now. It curls the edges of her stomach, sours the small amount of food she has ingested along with copious cups of coffee. She has taken pains to hide her fatigue and frayed nerves, especially from Hilda, but is perversely furious that her sister hasn’t noticed until now. She can’t stand to be around Hilda’s buoyancy, her newfound happiness, needs to smash it but can’t summon the energy. Without another word, Zelda tosses her napkin onto the table and stalks from the room, leaving Hilda to look after the sleeping baby.

An hour passes, two. Zelda is reading one of the naturalist novels she first studied in Paris at the turn of a century when the Civil War was recent history, Victoria sat upon the throne, and names like Flaubert and Zola elicited raised eyebrows and titillated gasps; before she settled into the rhythm of life in this provincial backwater. She hears her sister approach, shuffling in her hideous old slippers, but doesn’t look up, even though she has read the same passage twice.

“I made tea,” Hilda explains unnecessarily, placing the steaming cup on the end table. She hesitates, then lightly pats her sister’s shoulder before yanking her hand back as if she fears Zelda might break her fingers. Indeed she might.

Stupidly, so stupidly, Zelda has nearly finished the tea and her eyelids are growing heavy when she realizes Hilda has slipped her a sleeping potion. She could murder her for such impertinent kindness, but she is too tired to go through the rigamarole of burying Hilda in the pit. Her body is growing too heavy to do anything other than succumb to sleep. She manages to stand, clumsily kicks off her heels, and collapses in a heap on the library sofa, the stiff green velvet one that had belonged to Grandmother and is so beautiful and uncomfortable that a night on it will be akin to a night on the rack. 

Damn Hilda, Zelda thinks, leaden limbs leaving her trapped in her own body, her consciousness the last part of her to go. The younger witch should praise Satan that there’s a hard frost in the forecast tonight, cumbersome and treacherous to take a shovel to.

It’s her last waking thought.

—

The sound that draws Hilda from the cozy nook where she’s ensconced with her knitting and a black and white film on the telly isn’t a scream. A scream would have made her blood run cold, would have sent her racing toward the sound of the distress without a second thought; she knows this from experience. That’s just what you do, isn’t it, especially when you have an accident-prone, tempestuous teenage witch in the house?

But this is… eery, even for Chez Spellman. It’s guttural and raw, like the sound of a wounded animal or a creature being rent apart by lower demons. It makes the fine, downy hairs on her arms stand up straight. She drops a stitch, and then she too stands up, darts forward to the doorway and pauses, listening.

Yes, there it is again, like nothing else she has ever heard, yet tinged with familiarity. “Zelda!” she cries, and now she does run, starting so suddenly that she leaves a slipper behind. 

She doesn’t know exactly what description of horrid creature she expects to see attacking her older sister, but what she actually sees is nothing. Well, she sees Zelda, still on the sofa where she was when Hilda tiptoed in over an hour ago, ostensibly to remove the dregs of cold tea, really to check on her. Now, though, Zelda is thrashing about like a wild thing, panting for breath. As Hilda enters the room, Zelda lifts a hand to claw at the fragile antique upholstery, while the opposite knee jerks up and her back arches. It’s almost obscene.

The witching world is filled with unseen forces, but Hilda feels out the room, her consciousness reaching into every corner, and senses nothing alien or untoward. No, the library holds nothing more sinister than her sister’s magic, as familiar to Hilda as her own. The blonde breathes out a slow, calming breath before making her way further into the room, her blood pressure already beginning to even out.

Zelda may only be having a bad dream, but that’s no reason not to approach with extreme caution. Hilda doesn’t want to risk getting hexed or, more mundane but no less painful, socked in the jaw. “Zelda,” she begins softly. “Zelds, wake up, sister.”

Her touch accompanies her voice, palm open, gentle but firm enough to ground both women When she concentrates it comes so naturally to her, a soothing touch akin to healing magic. Zelda doesn’t react at first, still struggling and moaning softly. Hilda closes her eyes and focuses only on her sister. She can see her own magic, tinged deep blue with the effort to calm. It creeps toward Zelda’s energy, an angry, agitated crimson, and when it begins to infiltrate the edges, it swirls royal purple. Zelda’s frantic movements gradually still. Hilda settles beside her, half on the edge of the sofa.

“That’s right,” Hilda soothes, stroking bare skin where she can reach it: Zelda’s wrist blow the fitted sleeve of her dress, her neck, her smooth cheek. She hasn’t done this since they were girls, since Zelda decided they were both too grown-up to need such comfort. Unlike her, Hilda doesn’t think Zelda has had nightmares since then, as if she has warded them off by sheer will. As if she has been saving up all those decades of night terrors until now. “There, now. There, there, sister, I’m here.”

She only risks speaking to Zelda this way while she is unconscious. As soon as her blue eyes open, Hilda falls silent, but continues rubbing her sister’s hot, clammy hand.

“H-Hilda?” She is confused, and it takes her a couple of seconds to focus properly. When she does, she exclaims, “No!” and sits bolt upright, simultaneously shoving the shorter woman. Hilda is thrown off balance and lands in an undignified pose on the floor.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” Hilda says drolly, but Zelda doesn’t seem to hear. Her eyes are wild as they dart around the room, looking anywhere but at her.

“What — Why are you —?” she stammers after a moment, lifting a hand first to her throat, where Hilda can see her pulse still pounding, and then to her sweaty forehead.

“You’ve had a bad dream, is all,” Hilda says, rising onto her knees. “You cried out.” She can’t stop herself from reaching to smooth disheveled reddish blonde hair, and fights a wave of hurt when Zelda swats her hand.

“How — how foolish.” Zelda adjusts her skirt and slip where they’re rucked up above her knee, Hilda’s gaze instinctively following the movement. 

In the awkward silence, because it is awkward, although they are sisters, although they have slept in the same chamber for much of their lives, Hilda permits herself to chuckle. “Satan, Zelds, everyone has a nightmare from time to time.”

If possible, Zelda stiffens further. “You shouldn’t have left Leticia alone. Really, Hilda, as if a grown witch can’t weather something as banal as an unpleasant dream.”

Hilda swallows her sigh as her older sister stands and scoops up her shoes from where they laid abandoned on the Turkish carpet. Just once she wishes Zelda could accept compassion without needing to retaliate and belittle, but instead of making Hilda angry, it makes her sad. “The child is fine. Sleeping peacefully, which is more than I can say for you.”

“Yes, well, I’ll soon rectify that.”

It’s funny that Hilda’s instinct, which is to accompany her sister, tuck her between her sheets with a kiss to her porcelain cheek, remains untempered by so many years of experience and the sure knowledge that to do so would be most unwelcome. 

“Good night,” she calls after Zelda’s retreating form. She doesn’t expect a response, and doesn’t get one.

—

The dreams didn’t start when Hilda unceremoniously moved herself and her belongings into a drafty bedroom on the third floor, but that is when they intensified. They became a distraction during Zelda’s waking hours rather than something she cast off as soon as her eyes opened; they took form, coalesced in her conscious mind, and she had no choice but to bear their burden as she went about her daily business. She’s not certain whether to blame Hilda for this or to praise Satan that her sister’s sudden relocation has averted a much worse disaster. She half wonders if her sister’s return to their shared room might stop the nightmares, or at least send them back into the realm of misty semi-consciousness; but she’s sure she wants Hilda nowhere near her when she’s having them. Clawing her way back to consciousness to find Hilda beside her, touching her and murmuring quietly, had been more harrowing than the dream itself. For a moment she had thought — but no, praise be to the Dark Lord.

It isn’t the Batibat dream. She remembers that one in agonizing detail, so she knows. That nightmare ended with Hilda dead, while this one ends with them both very much alive and Hilda waking to wish herself dead, more dramatic and miserable than her teenage niece ever thought about being. But for a witch as proud and imperious as Zelda, there’s no agony deeper than shame, shame she richly deserves. It leaves her fingers twitching toward the cat of nine tails secreted in her wardrobe, longing for the cruel bite into her flesh. She’d told Hilda she wouldn’t do that any more, but if she thought it would be of any use, bring the slightest relief, she’d break her promise in a second.

Her… confessions to Faustus had been brought about by desperation, and supplication to the Dark Lord had helped a little. As much as it could help, when she confessed all but her one true crime, her immortal sin. She told the high priest she feared her family had started from the path of night, but the truth delivered to her by the dreams is that she herself is the source of the cancer perverting the unholy course of nature. She’d thought Father Blackwood might help her excise the disease, but in this as in so much else the man proved to be a disappointment. (So thinking, she looks at the bassinet in the corner of her bedroom, and finds the child looking right back, as often happens. Even a very precocious witch should still be too young to focus, but this is no ordinary babe. Zelda holds the gaze, raises an eyebrow, until the girl makes a snuffling sound and closes her dark eyes).

“As I thought,” Zelda says aloud. She has been too distracted to make any plans for the child’s future. She has hidden the baby; kept an ear to the ground for any sign that Prudence Night might waver in her secret-keeping; and cast a spell so unannounced visitors to the Spellmans’ will see nothing but an empty house, should they come knocking. This is not nothing, but it’s nowhere near enough.

She looks toward the side table where her tome of satanic verses rests, goes so far as to reach out and touch the cover. She can’t bring herself to pick it up and read it properly, hasn’t in days.

She turns her gaze upward to the ceiling. A watery December sun will rise soon, putting paid to a night she’d like to forget. At least Hilda (innocent Hilda, who does such a good impression of being dim-witted) hadn’t realized what she’d seen. Zelda’s eyes close on a wince, stay closed. She sees nothing but swirling blackness. It’s soothing, and she feels her body beginning to relax. 

After a few minutes she drops into a light, dreamless sleep.

—

Zelda doesn’t come down to breakfast for the first time in Sabrina and Ambrose’s recorded memory. Indeed, the last time Hilda didn’t see her sister’s face (or at least glimpses of it from behind the newspaper) across this breakfast table was when Zelda was little older than Sabrina is now. The top boy in her form at the academy, jealous of the red-haired witch’s sharper wit and higher marks, had hit her with a blood curse, felling her just before final exams. Hilda has never forgiven that boy.

Hilda is lost in her memories as Sabrina and Ambrose exchange a weighted glance. It is Sabrina, of course, who asks, “Auntie Hilda, where’s Auntie Zee?”

“Asleep, I imagine, poppet.” Hilda injects a strong note of cheer into her voice as she plops a basket of freshly baked apple muffins — her sister’s favorite, not to put too fine a point on it — between the younger witch and warlock. “She had a bit of a late night. Now eat up, both of you, or you’ll be tardy getting to the academy.”

Something is bothering Hilda, niggling at the edge of her consciousness, and it’s not just Zelda’s lie-in. It will come to her if it’s important, she hopes. She goes about tidying the kitchen, sipping her tea as she wipes down the counters. The routine is soothing. 

It’s when she returns the chopped walnuts to the pantry and comes eye to eight eyes with one of her familiars (Ethelred, who loves turning up in unexpected places) that she realizes. Her brow knits as she gazes at the spider, who patiently gazes back. After a moment she shuts the pantry door without even bothering to scold. Ethelred lists about as well as Hilda’s sister. And their niece. And their nephew. Bloody hell.

She takes out a tray and loads it with a teapot repurposed to hold still-hot coffee, a buttered muffin, and the morning’s Moscow Observer. Her feet are light and quick on the stairs. The door opens and there is Zelda, still and pale on her bed. Is she too still, too pale? A sort of superstitious dread sweeps over Hilda, and she loudly exclaims, “Zelda!”

The older witch is bolt upright in one fluid movement, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Hilda has always enjoyed that film, a guilty pleasure, but she does not enjoy the expression on Zelda’s face. It would do any demon-possessed mortal proud.

“Oh, dear, I’ve woken you,” Hilda tuts, “and with you needing your rest after last night, too. Silly me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Zelda retorts with all the hauteur she can muster twenty seconds after waking. “At this time of day? I was engaging in quiet contemplation, which is something you could do with more of.”

“Ah, well, I’ll just take this away then, shall I?” She makes to turn with the tray, being sure to give Zelda time to eye its contents.

“As you’ve already brought it, you may as well leave it.”

Hilda hides her smile behind her hair as she sets her burden down. She pours coffee into the fine china cup and passes it to her sister’s waiting fingers, softly brushing them in the process. “I did want to ask you something. About last night?”

Zelda eyes her above the rim of the cup.

“You said you had a nightmare,” Hilda continues. Zelda’s eyebrows arch, telegraphing her boredom with the conversation. “Well… It’s just that you couldn’t have done.”

“I beg your pardon?” returns Zelda, who has never begged for anything, not even as a child, and isn’t starting now.

“My familiars,” Hilda plods on. “Batibat? The dreamcatcher?”

Zelda frowns. “That was to trap the sleep demon.”

“Yes, but also no. It was for nightmares. Is for nightmares. There was a piece left, and they’ve been having a grand time adding onto it, Satan bless the dears. I even freshened up the incantation the other day when I was dusting. So there, you see, no nightmares!”

She waits for some sort of explanation, or at least a response. What she gets is Zelda staring at her.

“Rubbish,” Zelda says after the silence has grown lengthy. “You must’ve gotten the charm wrong; it wouldn’t be the first time.” She swings her bare feet onto the floor. “Now get me the broom. There are some cobwebs that need sweeping down.”

—

They argue, of course, about Zelda’s determination to destroy the dreamcatcher, and likely some of Hilda’s familiars along with it. Ambrose saunters in in the midst of Hilda chasing Zelda up the stairs while Zelda holds the broom aloft, out of the smaller woman’s reach; wisely, he leaves them to it. Zelda checks every nook and cranny she can think of, but comes up empty. Hilda manages to keep mum. After more than half an hour they are at a stand-off. Zelda pokes two of the spiders’ cages with the broom. Hilda can see how badly she wants to upturn all of them, send them scurrying, but the last time she did that the angry goblins swarmed her. Zelda would never admit to being afraid of spiders, but she doesn’t enjoy having them in her bodily orifices.

“Fine,” she says, throws the broom down. “Fine then, sister, have your way, and the entire family can thank you for plaguing us with hideous dreams.”

Hilda fully expects to wake up dead, but for the moment she relishes her victory. Zelda hates cooking, considers snacking between meals a mortal sin, and will never think to look in the back of the pantry behind Sabrina’s stash of Doritos. The dreamcatcher is safe. After the last few months the Spellmans have had, surely they deserve some peaceful, uninterrupted sleep.

She has to wonder, though: why is the dreamcatcher working for everyone except Zelda?

Hilda has always been a dreamer. About this she and her sister agree, although Zelda says it as if being a dreamer is in the same category with contracting a preventable but highly unpleasant social disease. As for Hilda, she reckons five hundred or a thousand years on earth would get pretty monotonous without a few wild dreams to sustain her.

Not that she finds her life boring. Far from it. The past fifteen and a half years since she and Zelda assumed guardianship of a dark-eyed, blonde baby have been the stablest of Hilda’s life, and, even if she admits it only to herself because she doesn’t want to encourage Zelda, the happiest. And now that Sabrina is testing her powers, likely to hex the neighbor’s dog or send the whole house up in flames at any moment, well, that’s enough excitement for anyone.

There’s only one problem, one tiny, itty-bitty thing that lends credence to Zelda’s position on the subject of dreaming. 

See, Hilda has always dreamed of finding one person to love her and be loved in return — a human idea, according to Father Blackwood, but Hilda isn’t convinced; Edward was able to find such a love. Witch orgies do nothing for her, masses of indistinguishable writhing limbs and sweaty bodies; the idea of having sex just for the sake of having it, even with only one person, holds no more appeal. This hovers at the back of her mind during her interactions with Cee. They’ve had 3.5 successful dates (she’s counting the post-“tornado” kiss), and there has been plenty of snogging on front porches and in cars, but that’s it. Cee is a perfect gentleman, but she senses that he is becoming impatient, or at least confused. Hilda herself is impatient and confused. She likes Cee tremendously, feels intellectually ready to take the top off the cookie jar, as it were. 

If things progress, she will eventually have to reveal to Cerberus (he says his parents were really into mythology) that she is a witch. It’s easy enough to think that’s what’s holding her back — look at the mess Sabrina got herself into with poor, dear Harvey. The thing is that Hilda has a sneaking suspicion she’s lying to herself.

Because liking someone tremendously, even liking kissing and being held by him, isn’t the same as being head-over-heels in love. And Cerberus’s kisses, well, possibly they are a little too wet, a bit too fleshy. He shaves every morning, but still his stubble irritates her skin. Sometimes he squeezes too hard, and she doesn’t care for the taste of the breath mints he prefers. These are all petty, insignificant things that shouldn’t matter — but they do matter, and that bothers Hilda. It makes her doubt everything else.

It boils down to this: being with Cee is nice, but it’s not the dream. In her dreams, everything is perfect. She knows that’s not realistic, but who needs realism when you’ve got magic?

Cerberus hasn’t appeared in any of Hilda’s dreams, not even with the aid of the dreamcatcher. She knows this, although she doesn’t remember her dreams clearly, only as flashes of smooth alabaster skin, soft curves, and bright hair. 

She’d thought, when she was a young woman newly away from home, liberated from parental constraints, that the solution was women. She’d found herself looking at other girls, at the sway of their hips and the smooth columns of their throats, and concluded she preferred witches to warlocks. There had been one young witch with a generous mouth and a sharp tongue. The dalliance had been… pleasurable. Thinking of it still makes Hilda flush a little. But it hadn’t been the dream either, and so the years, the centuries, had passed. 

And now here she is, back in her childhood home, ignoring her own dreams while she worries about her sister’s nightmares. She pretends not to notice when Zelda furtively extracts a warding candle from the utility drawer beside the refrigerator and takes it upstairs, but she decides that if unflappable Zelda is as tormented as all that, she has to do something.

Hilda hasn’t gone dream-walking in quite a while. Generally she is in favor of respecting others’ privacy, and has no desire to to see into the minds and hearts of the people she loves. She has always been sensibly afraid of what she might learn.

She closes her own bedroom door and begins to light a different kind of candle. She arranges them in a circle around her bed — they’re not totally necessary, but she’ll take the additional aid. She worries that her pronunciation is a little rusty, and she really doesn’t want to end up seeing what might be inhabiting her niece’s or nephew’s dreams by mistake. Truly, she is most apprehensive about peering into the mind of her dear sister, but.. “Needs must,” she says aloud, and positions herself on her bed.

She begins to think it’s not working, that she won’t be able to sleep, and then suddenly —

In media res: warm, soft, wicked lips forming themselves to hers, an even more wicked, delicious tongue pushing past her teeth — it is a shock at first, but a pleasurable, sensual shock, like slipping into very hot bath water. The sensations jolt through her system, and her eyes fly open.

But the truth is she knows what she will see, knows with absolute clarity that she has been here scores, hundreds of times before. 

She has taken a wrong turn in dream land.

With crystal clarity she knows she has experienced the shock, the realization, the horrible but tantalizing familiarity that same number of times minus one, and now that she is here again, she remembers that first dream. She remembers waking up in her girlhood bed, just out of puberty, panting and shaking and terrified by the rawness of first lust, more terrified by the still sleeping figure in the next bed.

And now, because this is her dream and it’s safe, she luxuriates in moaning her sister’s name against the hollow of Zelda’s throat before painting a broad stripe with her tongue. Dream Zelda is unrealistically pliable, Dream Hilda uncharacteristically bold: she is perched astride milky thighs, her right hand seeking the source of her sister’s unholy flame. Zelda is hot everywhere, but here the heat is so intense, like hellfire licking at Hilda’s skin as she so slowly plunges two fingers in all the way to the knuckle. Dream Zelda emits a high whining sound that thrills Hilda; it doesn’t matter if this is the first time or the four thousandth. It is so good and she wants so much more, she finds herself drowning in the wanting, and this is the real reason she memorized the memory erasing charm at fifteen, because she can’t live with this desperate yearning every day.

Suddenly the door flies open, and Sabrina is there, and Hilda is petrified that their niece is dream walking again and has caught them — but not them really, just Hilda; it’s her dream — in flagrante.

But Sabrina just exclaims, “Oh, Auntie Hilda, please wake up! Auntie Zee is going to kill me, and do eels live in fresh or salt water?”

Hilda manages to get herself together enough to shuffle halfway down the stairs, where she finds the rest of her family. Her mind is whirling, and it’s difficult to concentrate on Sabrina’s latest crisis, something about having transfigured the Scratch boy into a lamprey eel, of all things. Fortunately, Ambrose seems to have this one in hand, because Zelda looks not entirely present either. And no wonder, if her nightmare was anywhere near as intense as Hilda’s fantasy. Just thinking about it, she feels color flood her cheeks, and has to drop her gaze to the floor.

The back of Zelda’s hand brushes against her hip as they stand side by side, and Hilda jumps. Her sister’s pale, perfectly manicured fingers cannot truly be hot enough to burn through the poly-cotton blend of her gown, but they feel that way to Hilda. This is exactly why the memory-wiping spell has been a part of her morning routine since time immemorial — another detail she only remembers now that she has failed to use it. Zelda fully turns her head to look at her, and is her gaze a little sharper, a tad more penetrating than usual? Hilda squirms, feeling guilty and indiscreet.

Despite the fact that no one has ever professed much faith in Hilda’s magic, over the centuries she has realized she’s quite competent. Back upstairs, she looks around her little room at the still-flickering candles, and she can’t figure out what went wrong. She has the incantation by heart, and her intent was strong and clear; she should have fallen asleep and awoken in Zelda’s nightmare. It must be down to the dreamcatcher.

If its magic is as strong as that, and Zelda is plagued by nightmares anyway, Hilda really must get to the root of the problem. Perhaps someone has laid a curse?

She will feel better if she can just see for herself. The small blonde witch frowns with renewed resolve. “If at first you don’t succeed,” she says. She lays down stiff and straight in her little bed — she means business — and closes her eyes.

—

When Zelda decides to sleep with a warding candle, it is the second time she is glad Hilda has changed rooms — not that she would have bothered to explain herself.

She needs to believe the warding candle will do the trick, so, with the neat arithmetic of the soul and spirit she has mastered over two centuries, she does believe it. She falls asleep more easily, almost like a tired child, abandoning her consciousness to the Dark Lord for him to do as he will.

And she dreams the same dream, the one she is perhaps destined to dream until her spirit abandons this realm and her bones burn to ash.

It is unseemly to burn with desire for her own sister, embarrassing and uncomfortable to begin dreaming of it night after night; but it isn’t a taboo among witches as it is among mortals. It’s frowned upon somewhat by the current council, as all unproductive unions are — depleted numbers, etc. But this isn’t the source of Zelda’s shame. It’s not the carnal aspect that torments her. Hilda is sweetly pretty in a style nothing like her own, and Zelda has had a handful of centuries to contemplate her as an aesthetic object. These dreams crop up from time to time, typically after Hilda has done something especially infuriating; Zelda tells herself dreaming of fucking the younger woman into oblivion is no different from crushing her skull with a hammer.

But this is different.

The torment provided by this horrid dream that has been stuck on repeat for the past weeks has several particularly hellish features:

For one, kissing. This is how it begins, without any lengthy conversations or unmanageable declarations. Hilda is simply there, lying with Zelda in the older witch’s bed in the room that is still theirs, side by side as in childhood, and they are kissing. Usually one of Hilda’s soft round hands has winnowed its way into Zelda’s hair to cup her skull, and their lips are parted but still soft, just exploring. This stretches out for what seems like an eternity but may be seconds by the clock; Zelda never knows. It’s not the hungry devouring she usually imagines or has experienced with other lovers, but something altogether sweeter. Awake, Zelda would shun such sweetness, but in her dream she craves it. It should be cloying, but it’s Hilda, so it’s not, and this is the first moment that mortifies Zelda, this untapped desire for gentleness, for adoration that isn’t worship.

In this dream moment-eternity Zelda is content to remain unhurried, although her body pulses with need, because she feels the tentative hunger in Hilda’s kisses. Dream Hilda nips hard at her lower lip and then makes brief eye contact, pleased and surprised by her own boldness, and Zelda knows they are leisurely progressing toward something evilly delicious. 

The fantasy of fucking her sister isn’t new or embarrassing, but this isn’t about fucking. It is about the fulfillment of Zelda’s desperate, stupid, bottomless yearning to be loved and cherished above all else, not by anyone but by the person she makes a show of disparaging and taking for granted. It is always Hilda who has left her, in a thousand different ways large and small, Hilda who wants her own unshared life and pursuits and loves, and if Zelda declares loudly that she does not care, then it can’t hurt her.

Hilda says her name, both pleading and reverent, and then licks down to her collarbone. Zelda feels both actions jolt through her, and her toes curl. 

“Yes,” she assures her; “Yes.”

Dream Hilda is tentative but not inhibited. She touches Zelda’s breasts through thin fabric that seems to dissolve with the heat of her fingertips, weighs each in her palm, traces nipples that are already hard and tight. She’s not brave enough to disrobe her sister, but neither does she ask for permission as she inches Zelda’s silky gown up her thighs. Her touch is so soft, so gentle, infuriating and miraculous, and Zelda trembles, her muscles clenched, her heart in her throat.

Hilda stops. Zelda pries her eyes open, swallows audibly. Her lungs burn, she’s sure she has stopped breathing, but she won’t say —

“Please,” she whispers roughly. Even in her dream her body cringes in anger and humiliation, but Hilda is moving again, biting her throat; she sinks two fingers deeply inside Zelda, nails scraping, and the sensation is too delicious for Zelda to care about anything else.

And then Sabrina is there — there being upstairs, shouting. She thinks she is being quiet and secretive, and is achieving her usual success, which is none at all. Zelda aches, she is messily wet and would tight with unspent desire — and she is unspeakably relieved. By waking her up, Sabrina has stopped the dream before the worst part.

After Zelda has assured herself that Nicholas Scratch’s untimely death will not occur in the Spellmans’ first-floor bathroom and bring the wrath of the coven down upon their collective heads, and has frostily left Sabrina to clean up her own mess, she makes her way into the parlor. She pours small-batch bourbon into a highball glass, sips it as she walks slowly back to her too-quiet, too-still room, doesn’t look at the empty space where Hilda’s bed should be. She doesn’t think she will fall asleep again, thinks she has earned a reprieve.

She does; she hasn’t.

It’s almost as if Hilda has been there waiting for her. “There you are,” her sister says. It doesn’t make sense, because they are sweating and writhing together, aftershocks still skittering along Zelda’s nerves; of course she is there.

Zelda feels like her consciousness is trapped within her dream self, providing commentary, dreading what she knows is coming after the coming. She can’t stop it. All it takes is one long look from Hilda’s soft blue eyes —

“You know, don’t you, how precious you are? How I adore you?”

Even now Hilda blushes, eyelashes cast down, demurs.

The words are the worst part, tumbling out, unstoppable. Things she’d rather die than speak aloud. She is abject, pleading, begging. Pathetic. It boils down to one simple truth that should remain unutterable:

“Please, please don’t leave me again. I couldn’t bear it. I don’t know how to be without you. My love, my darling, please — I’ll do anything —“

Dream Hilda is supposed to mutter soothing nonsense, pet her hair and shoulders, until Zelda comes back to herself, awake, horrified. Her own voice will ring in her ears, the horrible, craven pleading — begging for devotion, for impossible love that can only be freely given, not taken, or she would have had it decades ago.

But Hilda sits up, stares at her, mouth agape. Her costume makeup from her shift at Dr. Cerberus’s, hastily removed, is smudged around her eyes, which is all wrong: nothing of that man or of the outside world belongs here. Her gown is wrong too, not the simple white cotton Zelda’s imagination conjures, but the loud floral number she actually sleeps in.

Hilda’s hands have fallen away from her sister to dangle limply at her sides. “Zelds?”

She hates the nickname, and only her sister has the temerity to use it. It sounds an odd, sour note. She frowns, can feel that rigid, unforgiving furrow carving across her brow. Hilda blanches.

And then — well, it seems like poof, Hilda vanishes, leaving Zelda behind. Zelda doesn’t remember waking up, but she is awake, sitting up in her bed. Offensively bright sunlight has crept in through the window. Leticia coos, kicks her little feet.

Zelda’s head spins. She needs coffee, needs it badly.

—

Hilda realizes Zelda has been right all these years: she is a fool.

Exhibit A: she staggers out of Zelda’s dream feeling as if she is punch drunk, jittery, her heart beating too fast and too hard — incredulous, but hopeful.

She needs to do something with herself, so she dresses quickly, runs downstairs, and frantically begins making a breakfast feast. She knows whipping up bacon and eggs or oatmeal won’t be enough to even begin steadying her nerves. She needs something lengthy, something complicated. She reaches for one of her recipe books from the old country, decides she can whip up some more muffins while she flips through the pages and chooses something else. Some of the pages are marked by smears of chocolate or lard, left by her own child-sized fingers while Grandmother taught her to prepare these recipes so long ago.

She tries to focus on chopping, mixing, blending, but every few minutes her heart gives a wild little leap. She can’t not be hopeful; it will keep rising in her chest, buoyant, irrepressible. She snatches looks at the clock, tells herself she is only timing the recipe, not waiting for Zelda to appear.

She knows it wasn’t exactly real, but what happened in the early morning hours feels like the most intimate experience of Hilda’s life. It was so very close to being the fulfillment of a long-held, cherished wish so secret she has never admitted it even to herself until now. The idea that beautiful, untouchable Zelda could not only desire her but love her that deeply, actually need her, is nearly too wonderful to consider.

At last. The footsteps on the stairs are unmistakable, even if they are also wrong, too slow. Hesitant.

Hilda turns to watch her descend, and the younger witch is eager and expectant. She knows it is shining all around her, a glowing aura, and Zelda will read it in an instant. Hilda turns her back, as if that will help. “How did you sleep, sister? Better, I trust?”

“Miserably.” At that Hilda turns back, and her eyes widen. Zelda is not disheveled — not Zelda, not even if she were at the brink of death — but she does look… haggard. Pinched. And there is a hard, mean look in her eyes.

Oh, Satan.

“What is that slop you’re making? It smells revolting and looks worse.”

Hilda glances at the ingredients strewn across the counter, the thick batter for what had been their shared childhood favorite, student with plump currants and sultanas. For all she cares, Zelda can throw the whole mess into the trash. “But,” Hilda tries again, clinging to hope, “but no nightmares, at least?”

Zelda stops dead on the other side of the counter and fixes her with a laser glare. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

Hilda can do nothing but stand there; she couldn’t move from the spot or utter a syllable if her life depended on it. And it might. Everything is crashing down around and inside her while her sister watches. Those blue eyes narrow a fraction, and Hilda’s heart shatters.

“The very same nightmare,” Zelda says, voice low and steady, leaning in closer. “Horrible. Torturous.”

She is unblinking, predatory. Hilda’s blood is rushing in her ears. She hears a high buzzing, and —

“Th-that was your nightmare?”

Hilda has confirmed what Zelda already knows, what she knew the second she saw Hilda’s too-bright, too-shiny, too-hopeful aura. 

The knife she had been using to cut fruit is at her jugular in a second. “How dare you violate me like that?”

“Violate *you*?” Hilda echoes. The words taste like dust. “Just to clarify,” she hisses, and it doesn’t even sound like her, “you’re going to kill me because I learned your worst nightmare is being intimate with me. Isn’t that enough?”

Zelda stares at her, and then falters. For a split second she looks like she might cry. Hilda feels the knife slip against her throat and then, from far away, Zelda exclaims, “Oh, you — you’re bleeding! You’re hurt.”

The knife clatters to the floor. Hilda closes her eyes and laughs. “That’s really rich, that is.” She senses the way Zelda reaches out, her hand hovering in mid-air before she lets it fall away and takes a step back. When her sister is at a safe distance, Hilda opens her eyes, retrieves the knife, holds it to her own throat, just where she can feel her pulse pounding. A nice solitary dirt nap sounds soothing. She’s wanted to sink into the earth before; here’s a way to do it. “Let’s get this over with.”

Zelda is on her before Hilda can imitate the quick, precise slitting motion she has learned from the older witch. She grabs for the knife, but when she can’t get purchase on the hilt, both of her hands close around the sharp blade and yank. Hilda gapes at her in astonishment, and Zelda looks blankly back, almost as astonished. As if in slow motion, Zelda’s fingers uncurl and the knife falls back to the floor. Both sisters look at her bloody hands, crimson fluid oozing from perfectly straight lacerations.

“Satan, Zelda. That was unnecessarily dramatic.”

Hilda doesn’t know where her well of cool reserve has come from, but it has the desired effect. Zelda glares at her, back to her old self in an instant. Well, almost back to her old self; blood is dripping onto the floor. “You could help me rather than critiquing my performance.”

Zelda can’t dig a grave with those hands, so Hilda glares right back, unimpressed. “It was quite a performance. Didn’t know you’d developed a taste for amateur theatrics.” 

Zelda’s eyes burn nearly black with fury, but she stands as meekly as a scolded child while her sister bandages her hands.

—

By the time Ambrose and Sabrina make their way downstairs, Hilda has made sausage, eggs, and toast, and Zelda is smoking and drinking her espresso behind Die Zeitung. Hilda sees them notice their aunt’s bandaged hands, and sees them mutually decide not to ask. It is all perfectly normal and completely wrong.

After their niece and nephew have left for the day and Zelda has vanished, Hilda goes into the pantry and calmly, systematically destroys the dreamcatcher, much to Ethelred’s dismay. She smashes a few jars of preserves too, for good measure, and for once in her life, leaves the mess for someone else to clean up.

—

The floor of the pantry is a sticky mess. Amateur theatrics indeed, Zelda thinks, rolling her eyes. Pot, kettle. She picks her way through the debris, careful not to get any on her shoes — this is one mess she won’t be cleaning up — and peers into the shadows. Ah, yes. There.

“All right, you,” she says. If she were fanciful by nature, she’d say the squat, stout spider regarded her suspiciously. “You know what to do. Get on with it.”

—

The magic required to transport another person into her dreamscape isn’t terribly complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, it feels like one of the hardest things Zelda has ever done, and it’s difficult to fall asleep when one is sick and paralyzed with dread, but eventually she manages. 

Hilda comes to her in the simple white cotton Zelda prefers, and she is warm and solid in Zelda’s arms, pressed close in the little bed. Zelda’s heart beats an unsteady rhythm as she kisses her sister’s blonde curls and soft cheeks; Zelda is nearly overcome with wistfulness at the thought that this may be the last time she does so. 

Too soon, Hilda pulls away and casts a wary eye over the older witch. Zelda automatically looks down at the black lace covering her own body and sees Hilda frown. She only has a split second to wonder what, if anything, her sister might imagine her wearing, before Hilda speaks.

“It’s you, isn’t it? You’re in my dream again.” Hilda sounds dispirited; her round shoulders droop. Zelda hates the way she looks, as if she has been kicked and is waiting to be kicked again. The older sister knows she is the one who does the kicking. It’s hard to accept that her real self is a such a poor substitute for the fantasy version.

This is a terrible idea, the sort of thing Sabrina would cook up. And yet…

“Not exactly, sister.” She squares her own shoulders as Hilda hesitantly looks around the familiar room as if expecting some clue. The lamp burns low, but there are the two beds, Zelda’s book of satanic verses on the night stand, the trunk Hilda inherited from their great-grandmother that Zelda pretends not to know contains insipid romantic trash. Nothing is out of place, exactly as it was only a few weeks ago and should be now.

Hilda frowns. “But how? I destroyed the dreamcatcher. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Zelda cringes. She has done it again, taken something precious and beautiful and distorted it, made it ugly and shameful. “I repaired it.”

Hilda physically shrinks away. “Why? Zelda, why would you do this? Wasn’t it enough before? It’s needlessly cruel, even for you.” She won’t meet her sister’s eyes now, is looking for a place to hide, even though she knows she is literally trapped like prey in the spider’s web.

“One of your familiars helped me. The little fat one in the pantry.” This is meant as reassurance: familiars are protective goblins, and will never act to harm their masters. Hilda can’t think of that now, though, and only looks more betrayed.

“I have no desire to hurt you,” Zelda tries more directly. Hilda’s wide blue eyes are incredulous, but at least she’s looking again.

“Why are we in here?” she asks abruptly, words sharp with suspicion. In her dreams, they are always in her new bedroom; Zelda coming to her, seeking her, is an integral part of the fantasy.

… except last night, when Hilda tried to enter her sister’s dream but ended up in a skewed version of her own —

Oh. It feels like a great weight falling upon her and then straining, but failing, to lift away. 

Her older sister can read all of this in Hilda’s eyes. She knows her sister better than she knows herself; Hilda is simpler, or at least Zelda likes to think so. “I’ve brought you to my dream,” the red-haired witch continues carefully. She wants to lift that weight away from Hilda, but if she could do it without having to say the blessed words —

“To your nightmare.”

“No, to my dream,” Zelda repeats. She tries not to sound testy. “So you could see.”

Hilda stares at her with her huge limpid eyes and Zelda attempts not to fidget. Fails. Her thumb and forefinger pluck at the lace dangling from her wrist.

“Do I have to spell it out?” she finally explodes. “Honestly, sister, use your head for once!”

Oddly, the outburst is just what they need. It injects a note of normality into the surreal scene, as if they are facing one another across a jigsaw puzzle rather than in a dreamscape.

“This isn’t your nightmare?” Zelda is trying to be on her best behavior, truly, but the eye-roll is automatic. “But — but you said —“

Hilda doesn’t flinch away this time as Zelda cups her cheek, her thumb drawing an abstract pattern at the corner of her mouth. Zelda sees her swallow, is certain Hilda feels the electric current arcing between them. Dark blue eyes lock with light, and although neither of them is corporeally present, it feels unbearably real. Zelda’s mouth is so dry that she has to try twice to speak.

“Not this,” she promises. “Never this.” 

They hover there together on the edge of the bed, both afraid to break what feels like a half-truce.

“I’m going to wake up now,” the older witch says. Hilda bites her lip, her teeth leaving a white imprint. Her gaze drops to her sister’s mouth, and then her eyes find Zelda’s. Hilda looks paralyzed by conflicting impulses.

So Zelda kisses her, just a soft brush of lips with a little press at the end, like a punctuation mark. She hopes she has said enough.

In the next instant she is sitting alone in the low light of her bedroom, surrounded by flickering candles. She tries to take a deep breath through her nose, feels the way her inhalation trembles. “Your move, sister,” she murmurs.

And then Zelda does something that does not come at all naturally to her, a decisive woman of action.

She waits.

—

Hilda lies rigid in her bed, not moving, barely breathing, as if stillness will fool the universe into believing she is still asleep, perhaps forgetting she even exists. Only her eyes move, peering into the darkness.

For a few minutes, she thinks Zelda will come. She listens for footsteps on the stairs, in the hall.

For a few more minutes, she thinks Zelda might come. Her ears strain a little harder.

And then she realizes Zelda will not come, and she is equal parts heartbroken and relieved.

A few more moments pass, and Hilda realizes she is far more heartbroken than relieved. It takes still a few more moments before she snaps to attention and realizes she is being a ninny. 

Force of habit is hard to break after more than two centuries, and she is so used to Zelda taking the lead and being the brave one — she chafes sometimes, but truly there is comfort in knowing she seldom has to be the decision-maker. Zelda never admits to being afraid, so Hilda has come to think of her that way, as utterly fearless. Zelda hadn’t been fearless tonight, but she had been brave.

Hilda has questions, many of them. The only way to get any answers is to go and ask.

The flight of stairs is too short, but the corridor has never seemed so long. I am being brave, she tells herself, determined to make it true.

“Zelda?”

She doesn’t answer, but as Hilda’s eyes adjust, she can see that her sister is sitting up on her bed, her face turned toward the window. Hilda steps cautiously into the room that was recently theirs, softly closes the door behind her. When Zelda still doesn’t speak, Hilda feels the desperate need to say something, but no words will come. Her heart pounds, frantic.

“You took your time.” The quaver in her low alto is subtle, but Hilda has been attuned to her sister’s cadences since before the younger witch could even talk.

“I —“ she starts, then stops. Hilda will not feel guilty. Zelda has had to wait for her for maybe forty-five minutes, but she has waited for Zelda since — she doesn’t know when, exactly, but her childhood memories are primarily of Zelda, of wanting to be as close to Zelda as possible, of chasing after red-gold hair and freckles as fast as her chubby little legs would carry her. “You meant what you said? Your nightmare wasn’t — it wasn’t me?”

The quaver is more audible. “Of course I meant it. Do you doubt me so?”

“It, well, it’s nice to know. You’ve kept it well under wraps.”

“How could I ever have told you?”

In the flickering light of the candles, Hilda can now see the tear tracks on Zelda’s cheeks, and she no longer cares so much who has been waiting for whom. “Oh, my love.”

The words come easily, she has said them hundreds of times, but now the valence is different. Zelda’s head turns, and Hilda clambers onto the bed beside her, takes her into her arms. For the first time in a very very long time, she is confident the embrace won’t be rejected. Zelda is all cool, embroidered silk and warm skin, and Hilda breathes her in, nuzzling into the crook of her neck. Zelda’s arms go around her, so painfully tight that Hilda fleetingly thinks they might be enchanted.

“Hilda,” she says hoarsely, “my Hilda, my —“

Hilda wants to hear more, but she is being brave, and she has to kiss her sister right this second.

Zelda’s wicked mouth is much sweeter than it should be, as delicious as Hilda has always known it would be; never in her wildest dreams has she imagined the way Zelda wraps herself around her, clinging.

“Say it,” Zelda hisses when they come up for air. Normally her tone would be threatening, but her skin is mottled from Hilda’s sucking and biting, and her chest is heaving against Hilda’s own.

“I want you.”

That was perhaps not what she was supposed to say. Zelda pulls her hair, hard, and to both their surprise, Hilda laughs loudly and joyously.

She has always felt ungainly and oversized when she has approached these situations before, when she has even thought of them; but Zelda is so eager and greedy as she grips Hilda’s hips, as she strokes lightly over her tummy and thighs, that Hilda finds she doesn’t mind, at least not too much.

There’s just one thing the younger witch has to know.

“Zelda,” she gasps out, and she has to put one hand on her sister’s shoulder to leverage her away. “Zelds, I don’t understand. What was the nightmare?”

Zelda stops kissing her, and for a few seconds she thinks she has ruined it. But then Zelda is turning away just enough to tuck Hilda into the hollow of her shoulder, and Hilda recognizes Zelda’s way of hiding her own expression. “I was pathetic.” Her voice is strained. “I groveled, I b-begged you —“

Everything falls into place, like the twist of a kaleidoscope, revealing a scene that is incandescent and indescribably in its clarity. It is a strange sensation, being filled with joy while her heart breaks a little. Zelda may be a harsh critic of everyone around her, but she is always harshest with herself, even in dreams. Zelda never welcomes pop psychology, and certainly won’t now, so Hilda won’t point out that Zelda’s “nightmare” was a fantasy as much as Hilda’s was, an opportunity for her to voice all the doubts that must have been eating away at her more insidiously than a blood curse, and for Hilda to reassure her. Instead, she squeezes a little tighter, and closes her eyes for a second as Zelda squeezes back. How much time they’ve wasted on fear and doubt.

“My love, I’m yours. I always have been,” Hilda states, gripping her sister’s stubborn chin and turning Zelda back to face her. “Don’t you see that I’ve never wanted anyone but you, silly girl?” 

Their eyes meet for the space of several heartbeats, and then Zelda is pushing her back onto the mattress, covering Hilda’s body with her own, slipping a thigh between her legs. Repayment, perhaps, for calling her a silly girl. 

“Uh-uh,” Hilda says. Magic sparks gold as she flips them easily. Zelda looks surprised, and then smirks. The smirk is evil.

“All right, then. What is it that you want to do? Go ahead.”

Hilda gulps at the challenge, summons her courage. There is another sharp burst of gold, and in the next instant they are both naked, their clothes folded on the armchair across the room. Zelda chuckles, her eyes dark with approval.

“This is how I dreamed it too,” Hilda confesses. “Sometimes, anyway.”

Hilda resolves not to ruin this by worrying about her inexperience, and settles more firmly over Zelda’s glorious body. She focuses on the sensation of skin against skin, the sharpness of Zelda’s hip bones, the little swell of her abdomen that she hates and Hilda loves. Hilda rests against her, breast to breast, letting the sensations wash over her. Zelda is very still, catlike and waiting to pounce, so Hilda pounces first.

Zelda’s nipple in her mouth, then between her teeth, is her new favorite treat. Zelda sighs and toys with her hair as she licks and lightly sucks, clutches hard and growls when she bites down. Hilda bites again, and her sister emits a low, guttural sound that Hilda recognizes immediately. She flushes, wonders now how she could have been so naive. Zelda begins to rock up against her, sinuous and lewd, and the younger witch feels her own body liquefying, becoming nothing but molten heat. There is so much to explore and to try, but at last, after centuries, there is nothing between them, and —

“Do something, or I will,” Zelda says with rough urgency. It thrills Hilda from the ends of her hair to the tips of her toes.

“Say please,” she returns, bolder than she has ever dared to be.

Zelda glares at her in silence.

Without breaking eye contact, Hilda transfers all of her weight onto one elbow and slips the opposite hand between them. Her fingertips brush the soft, damp hair outlining her sister’s lower lips, once, twice. She stops, gaze riveted to Zelda’s mouth, lips pink and parted and unrighteously appealing. Zelda’s tongue peeks out, licking slowly. The deliberate movement makes Hilda shudder.

“Say p-please,” she repeats, far less commanding.

Zelda’s glare intensifies. “You want me to beg?”

Hilda recognizes her mis-step, can’t believe she has been so stupid. “No,” she clarifies. “I want you to ask nicely.”

Zelda’s teeth glint in a predatory smile. “But sister, you forget. I’m not nice.”

Being in control is fun, but giving up control is fun too, Hilda decides.

In a second she is sprawled on her back, Zelda kneeling astride one of her thighs, those sure, expert fingers dipping between her lips where she is impossibly wet before coming up, tracing either side of her clit with long, sure strokes, and then making tight circles, and then both.

“Oh!” Hilda exclaims, which isn’t eloquent, but this is the most amazing thing she has ever felt in her life, and she knows deep down that Zelda will take care of her, just as she has always taken care of her, even if Zelda’s twisted version of that occasionally involves blunt force trauma. Zelda’s fingers dip down again, thrust shallowly inside, stretching and filling, and Hilda makes a sound that should be embarrassing but isn’t. Zelda moans, whether inspired by Hilda’s vocalizations or the feel of her most intimate place or both; and Hilda in turn doesn’t know if it’s the sound or the way Zelda moves her fingers or the spicy-sweet scent of her skin, but she shatters with no preamble. 

The whole thing is over in two minutes. That’s what happens, she supposes, after two hundred years of foreplay. Hilda is too dazed to be dismayed, and tells herself there will be other opportunities to play, hopefully before the sun rises again.

She expects Zelda to laugh at her, but she doesn’t, just smirks and kisses her sweaty temple. Her eyes are happy, Hilda notes.

When Hilda regains the power of speech, she murmurs, “Sister, would you like to know what else I dreamed?”

Zelda laughs then, rich and dark. “Satan, yes.”

“I dreamed about how you’d taste.”

Zelda looks like she has been waiting a lifetime for Hilda to put her pretty mouth to better use than talking or eating. 

It turns out that the essence of Zelda is dark, almost bitter, but with an undercurrent of sweetness. It’s fitting.

And here is something else Hilda has been waiting a lifetime to experience: Zelda unrestrained, wild, legs spread obscenely while she bucks against Hilda’s face. Hilda is soaked, surrounded by her, and no, this is her new favorite treat.

Zelda comes silently, mouth open in a soundless scream, fingers twisting in a death-grip on the sheets. Hilda is more proud of herself than she has ever been in her life, including the time Virginia Woolf called her “a most interesting conversationalist.”

She strokes strawberry blonde hair until Zelda’s breathing returns to near normal. The room smells of sweat and sex and candles, and she hopes Sabrina is sleeping soundly. “Zelda, would you like to know what else I dreamed?”

The older witch chuckles, opens her eyes and stretches. “Oh, suddenly insatiable, are we?”

Hilda blushes, but the glint in her sister’s eyes isn’t mean, only mischievous. Maybe covetous. “We have a lot of time to make up for.”

“And all the time in the world to do it.” Zelda twists in the bed that’s too small for two adults, kisses her shoulder, her jaw, her eyelid. “We can’t have you running out of ideas and getting bored.”

As if Zelda doesn’t know a thing or two thousand, Hilda thinks, but lets her sister tug her into a loose embrace. Zelda’s warm skin feels lovely against hers, and it is late, and they haven’t been sleeping well. The last thing she says before dropping into a deep sleep is, “No danger of that, sister. You know I’ve always been a dreamer.”

The last of Zelda’s candles flickers, casting a deep orange shadow over the two sisters, and winks out. 

Downstairs, stolid Vinegar Tom dozes on, and Ethelred spins away in the recesses of the messy pantry, creating elaborate designs around splotches of strawberry jam.


End file.
